I recently had the honor of speaking with Bill Jelen, a.k.a. Mr. Excel. He’s a big, big deal in the Excel community! I’ve internet-stalked him for years on his website and his popular YouTube channel and frankly, I’m still shocked he agreed to come speak with us. We talked about his background, favorite Excel features, how many of the more than 480+ Excel functions he actually uses and more.
Bar charts aren’t evil. But they’re overused. I talked about Designs to Start Using Instead at the DataScienceGO conference in April 2021. We talked about my three favorite techniques for exploratory data visualization– spark lines, data bars and heat tables– and then I gave them some different options for maps. Are you ready to escape the bar chart?
Vlookup is my all-time favorite function in Excel! (Well, the entire lookup family—vlookup, hlookup, index-match, and xlookup.) In this blog post, I’ll walk you through what what vlookup is used for, why it’s tricky and how to fill in the four pieces of the formula. In this blog post, you’ll learn what vlookup is used for; why vlookup can be tricky; how to fill in the four pieces of the formula.
Data cleaning and data analysis alone can take hours, days, or weeks. It will always take some time, but it doesn’t have to take forever. It might not be your favorite part of the process. But it doesn’t have to be a headache, either.
In this blog post, we’ll cover 10 analytical skills that can make your next data project easier, faster, and error-free.
“You should go work at Microsoft and fix Excel’s terrible formatting.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this from workshop participants. Bill Gates, are you reading this?? Microsoft Excel is lonnnnng overdue for some updates. Don’t get me wrong—it’s still my favorite program. With 750 million users worldwide, I won’t be switching to anything else. It’s used by every business professional I know for at least part of their workflow. I’m getting tired of making excuses for Microsoft. Here are 24 conditional formatting visuals that should be retired ASAP because they’re ableist, time-consuming to read, or look like they’re from 1995.